Cities will bear the brunt of these catastrophes. Even as they become the world’s demographic centers, economic drivers, and political powers, cities face unprecedented risks from cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis. more> http://tinyurl.com/k9kvy3k

Why? The science so far doesn’t answer this question, though it’s easy enough to imagine how subsistence farmers could come into greater conflict with one another as their croplands become less productive. Or how, in the face of rising sea levels, coastal dwellers could come to blows over shrinking habitable land. more> http://tinyurl.com/q7dcc2w

R&D – Research shows that the strength of radio signals on the ground is a reliable indicator of temperature change above. Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University and his team used simple radio antennae on the ground to measure radio waves broadcast by navigational transmitters around the globe, then compared information on the strength of these radio signals with data on temperature fluctuations in the upper atmosphere. They discovered that climate change in the upper atmosphere—caused by an abundance of greenhouse gases—may lead to a greater absorption of radio waves. Weaker signals could therefore be indicative of greater climate change. more> http://tinyurl.com/mrpvbtn

R&D Mag – The warmer the air, the more water can evaporate: a simple relationship familiar to us from everyday life. Researchers from Germany and the Netherlands have now established that this is not always the case: although an increase in the greenhouse gasCO2 makes the climate warmer, it also allows less water to evaporate.

“We wanted to know how the foreseeable rise in CO2 would affect cloud formation in temperate climate zones and what part the vegetation plays in this,” says Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands. Working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institutes for Chemistry and Meteorology, the geophysicists made use of, for the first time, a computer model that takes account of the soil, water cycle, atmosphere and growth processes of plants. The model results highlight how local and daily variable processes, through turbulence, can influence the atmosphere on larger scales. more> http://tinyurl.com/bllvx32

The study offers an updated calculation of the Earth’s energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth’s surface and the amount returned to space as heat. The researchers’ calculations show that, despite unusually low solar activity between 2005 and 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy than it returned to space.

The calculated value of the imbalance (0.58 W of excess energy per square meter) is more than twice as much as the reduction in the amount of solar energy supplied to the planet between maximum and minimum solar activity (0.25 W per square meter). more> http://is.gd/RMiIa8